The Calling Number Display and Recording System provides an apparatus which integrates customer-owned telephone equipment with the Calling Party Identification Service (CIDS). CIDS adds signals to the Central Telephone Switching Office signals that are conveyed on a telephone line between the Central Office and a telephone user. The CIDS signals that are added include calling party information such as the telephone number and area code of the telephone that initiates a call. Other information, such as the caller's name, is generally not provided by CIDS at the present time. CIDS is being implemented in many Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) markets as they become equipped with out-of-band signalling such as Signalling System 7 (SS7). The SS7 protocol is described in Communications Research ("Bellcore") documents TR-TSY-000030/000031, dated November, 1988. Some major areas which support the CIDS system include the states of Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, the Province of Ontario, Canada and the Chicago metropolitan area. The service is being provided by companies including the New York and New England Telephone Companies (NYNEX), Bell Atlantic, Illinois Bell, Southern Bell, Bell South and Bell Canada, to name just a few. General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) and many other independent companies are also implementing CIDS on SS7 switched exchanges.
Intra-area telephone CIDS is being supplemented with inter-area CIDS. Federal legislation currently pending is expected to establish standards for CIDS implementation which will precede a homogeneous and universally applicable CIDS system. This legislation will further expedite nationwide, and eventually continent-wide, CIDS implementation.
Existing CIDS systems allow a called party to see the telephone numbers of the last twenty to fifty callers on special, integrated telephone receiver displays. There is, however, no existing system which integrates CIDS into existing customer-owned equipment. If the Local Exchange Carrier customer has purchased a CIDS receiver, and has also purchased an answering machine to receive and store incoming calls for later retrieval, there is no current system which integrates the answering machine or other customer-owned equipment with the CIDS information. The customer would greatly benefit if existing customer-owned equipment such as standard receivers, cellular telephones, facsimile machines and call diverters could be adapted to provide the benefits of retention and forwarding of CIDS information.
The problem of providing the telephone customer with the ability to record and use the CIDS information on existing customer-owned equipment such as answering machines or personal computers in a way that all of his or her other owned telephone equipment could be retained has presented a major challenge to designers of telephone equipment. A device which captures caller identification information from the Central Telephone Office signals, displays and records the information for later use, would represent a major technical advance in the telephonic communication field.